Breakfast
The first thing I registered was the ceiling.
Twelve feet of plaster medallions, crown molding thick as my forearm, a fresco in the center panel that had faded to something soft and indeterminate — cherubs, maybe, or clouds, or the memory of both. Not my ceiling. My ceiling was eight feet of water-damaged drywall above a food bank.
I didn't have to look beside me to know he was awake. Judah didn't sleep; he just waited for the sun to catch up to him. I kept my eyes closed, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs that I knew he could hear. I was a guest in this bed the way a bird is a guest in a cage.
I felt him shift.
His palm landed heavy on my mid-thigh, his fingers sinking into my skin with a blunt, bruising certainty. He wasn't checking to see if I was awake; he was reminding me who owned the legs he was touching.
“Good morning, Mercy,” he said, voice rough with the night’s remnants. No confusion about who I was or why I was here.
His hand continued its journey upward, and I fought the urge to arch into his touch. “I should go,” I whispered, even as my body betrayed me, shifting closer.
“Should you?” The question hung between us as his palm found the curve of my hip, fingers splaying possessively across my skin. “I don’t recall giving you permission to leave my bed.”
At first I thought he was joking. But when I realized he wasn’t, I felt a shameful thrill run down my spine, pooling low in my belly. This was Judah Beaumont — the man who controlled everything in St. Francisville, including… apparently, me.
“Permission?” I managed, trying to sound defiant despite the way my skin burned beneath his touch.
“I’m a possessive man.” His fingers traced higher, skimming over my ribs under the shirt, thumb brushing the underside of my breast. “A shortcoming I cannot seem to shake.” His eyes fell to the curve of my breast as he pushed himself up on his elbow.
“I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine,” he quoted the scripture. Solomon 6:3.
My breath caught in my throat. The words hung in the air between us, a confession and a warning all at once.
His hand cupped my breast fully now, thumb circling lazily over my nipple until it hardened beneath his touch.
“Song of Solomon,” I whispered. “You’re quoting love poetry from the Bible while you...” My voice trailed off as his lips found my neck, pressing against the tender spot he’d discovered last night.
“While I what, Mercy?” His breath was warm against my skin. “While I touch what belongs to me? While I worship what I’ve claimed?” His teeth grazed my earlobe, and I gasped.
There was blasphemy in his words, but they resonated through me like church bells. I should have been appalled — should have pushed him away — but instead, I turned toward him, my hand finding the hard plane of his chest.
“You’re different than you were yesterday,” I murmured, feeling the cross against my palm as I traced the contours of his muscles.
“Yesterday I had to be careful,” Judah replied, rolling me beneath him in one fluid motion. His weight pressed me into the mattress, his thighs caging mine. “Today I can show you what I think redemption feels like.”
I let out a breath that didn’t sound steady, even to me. “That’s a strange word to use for this.”
His mouth brushed my throat again, slower this time; he was in no hurry to answer. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
His hand didn’t stop moving. That was what made it worse — the certainty of it, the way he acted like this had already been decided somewhere outside of me.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“I know.”
“Then don’t pretend you don’t understand.”
I tightened my hand against his chest, feeling the cross under my palm. “Understanding and agreeing aren’t the same thing.”
“No,” he said, calm as ever. “But they tend to lead to the same place.”
My stomach turned at that, even as my body refused to follow the logic of it. I could leave. I knew I could. The door was there, the hallway, the rest of the house.
I didn’t move.
His eyes dropped to my mouth for a second before lifting again. He noticed everything. That was becoming clear in ways I didn’t like.
“Say it again,” he said.
“What?”
“That you should go.”
I swallowed. “I should go.”
He held my gaze, searching for something I couldn’t name, and then he nodded once.
“Then go.”
He didn’t move his hand. He didn’t shift his weight. He didn’t make space for me. He just said it and waited.
I stayed exactly where I was.
He didn't ask if I was hungry. He told me to get dressed.
Not rudely. Just the way he said most things — as if the question had already been asked and answered somewhere he hadn't bothered to include me in.
I stood in his bathroom in yesterday's underwear with my hair doing something catastrophic and considered, for approximately four seconds, telling him I had things to do.
Then I put on the sundress.
It was the only thing I had. He'd driven me here from the fish fry and my apartment was across town, and this was the bed I'd made, figuratively and literally. So, I zipped the back myself, found one of my pins on the nightstand and did what I could with my hair, and walked out.
He was already dressed. Dark shirt, dark trousers.
“I look like I'm doing the walk of shame,” I said.
“You look like you're having breakfast with me.”
“In last night's dress.”
“Yes.” He held the door open. End of discussion.
The restaurant was called Maison Fontenelle, which should've told me everything about what kind of place it was.
Old building, high ceilings, white tablecloths.
One of those places where the menus didn't have prices, which meant either it was very expensive or they assumed you weren't paying.
Either way, not a breakfast spot. Lunch, maybe, if lunch happened at eleven on a Monday and the ma?tre d' greeted you by name and led you to a corner table that faced the room.
It faced the room.
I sat down and understood.
He wanted to be seen. More specifically, he wanted me to be seen. Sitting across from him. In last night's dress with my hair pinned up and his cologne still in the fabric. The whole town could read that.
The whole town, by the look of things, was here.
Not literally. But enough of it. Mrs. Tureaud at a table near the window. Two men I recognized from the fundraiser. A woman from the congregation who'd squeezed my hands at the fish fry and said things I was still trying to understand.
Every single one of them looked. Some looked away quickly. Some didn't bother.
Judah opened the menu.
“You did this on purpose,” I said.
“Did what?”
“This.” I gestured, very slightly, at the room. At us. At the theater of it.
He didn't look up. “Order something. You haven't eaten.”
“Judah.”
He looked up then. Those pale eyes, completely steady. “The whole town already thinks what it thinks, Mercy. I'm just confirming it.”
Something hot moved through me that wasn't entirely anger. “You could've asked.”
“You're here.” He went back to the menu. “That's your answer.”
He was right, which was the most infuriating thing about him.
I was here. In the dress. Having let him drive me to a white-tablecloth restaurant on a Monday morning like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I'd made my choices. They'd just somehow all ended up pointing in the same direction without me noticing until I was already seated.
I picked up the menu.
He ordered for me. I let him, which I told myself was because I didn't know the menu and not because something about the way he spoke to the waiter — quiet, certain, no performance in it — made my stomach do a slow, traitorous roll.
The food came. We ate. He asked me, at one point, what I thought of the city budget process for the food bank grant cycle, which was such a deliberately normal question I almost laughed.
“You're doing it again,” I said.
“Doing what.”
“The thing where you act like last night didn't happen.”
He cut his food. Precise. “Last night happened.”
“Then why are we talking about grant cycles.”
“Because,” he said, without looking up, “we also have to be able to do this.”
I watched him. “This.”
“Sit across from each other and have a conversation that doesn't end in one of us saying something they can't take back.” He set his fork down and looked at me. “I'm trying to give us that.”
A part of me doubted that.
And another, a rather dominant one, yearned for the danger he was promising. The sane thought would’ve been to schedule an appointment with a psychotherapist.
I didn’t know if St. Francisville had one.
I considered asking him.
Then I looked at his cleanly shaved jaw, the dark hair, the light eyes, and decided to cut my food instead.
The morning light came through the tall windows and caught the silver in the room and made everything look like something it wasn't, and I thought: this is the thing that's going to ruin me. Not the darkness of him. The moments where he acts like a person.
“Okay,” I said.
We talked about the grant cycle.
I really should’ve asked about that psychotherapist.
Halfway through coffee, his hand moved under the table.
Leisurely. At first his fingers found my knee and stayed there, which was worse than anything with intent would have been. Just his palm against my kneecap, warm through the fabric. Casual. Like it had been there before and expected to be there again.
I kept talking. Something about the volunteer schedule. I don't remember what.
His thumb moved. A slow arc across the inside of my knee. I now saw why he had sat down beside me and not across from me.
Mrs. Tureaud glanced over from her table. She saw Judah's shoulder, my face, the stillness I was working very hard to maintain, and she smiled into her coffee like she'd won something.
“You're doing this on purpose,” I said again, quieter this time.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because you keep doing it.”